Confessions of a Grandma

The view out my back door this morning, April 16.  At least the sun in out.  It won't last.  Hard to believe it was up to 80 degrees on Monday though.  Between the mountain snow melt in the warm temperatures and the heavy rains yesterday, there will be flooding down hill of us for sure.  I opened up some windows on Monday.  The winds that were ushering in the cold front also blew in a great deal of pollen.  I sneezed about twenty times in a row before I thought to close the windows again.  At least all the rain and snow settled the pollen for a bit. Spring means spring cleaning. I emptied out my closet and gave it a scrub. I did some purging, although not enough.  Anyway, a trip to the Salvation Army is in my future. We did some baking this past weekend.  My loaf of bread is on the left and my son's loaf of bread is on the right.  I follow a recipe and he throws ingredients together from memory.  I bake ...

The yard: I try to keep a daily bit of time for pulling weeds from the flower gardens.  When Mike mows  the lawn, I try to keep up with the sweeping.  Monday is my designated day of putting on the the grubby garden clothes and doing a thorough weeding.  Sometimes. I let that go.  Here is the result: Do you think it is time to do some edging??   The dry weather and the opportunistic nature of crab grass are pretty evident here. Even with the edging, things don’t look that great here.  It has been a dry and hot summer, 2012. (Linda Reeder, I am so embarrassed.) The harvest has started, though.  This year I planted tomatoes and peppers only.  Late season blight has been noted in the area, but I have not been affected yet. Yet! I had a satisfying supper of roasted tomato and peppers on polenta tonight. ******* Green clean: I have a lot of mint in my herb garden this year.  I will try a combination of mint and rosemary a...

Today was the day to replenish my cleaning supplies.  With the mini financial crisis brought on by Mike’s medications and his position in the donut hole, we have been looking at ways to cut back on expenses.  And of course I have been a follower of Green Clean: the Environmentally Sound Guide to Cleaning Your Home (Melcher Media, 2005) for a few years now. I also usually have an abundance of lavender and thyme in my garden and I can use those herbs in some of the homemade cleaners.  I put a cup or so of lavender flowers and a cup or so of thyme sprigs in a quart jar and then fill with white vinegar.  Some times I use sage or mint, too.  After that steeps for a couple of days, I strain the vinegar into a spray bottle.  It is an effective disinfectant. I use this for a daily shower spray.  If you give the tile or tub enclosure a good scrub to start with, this will keep the soap scum at bay a bit longer between major cleanings.  Put 1/2 cup whit...

Today's garden work involved pruning.  I gave a pretty severe trimming to the lavender in the flower garden and to the spirea in the side yard.  I pruned out the four lilac bushes and snipped off some sucker branches from the two crab apple trees.  Now I have a large pile to haul off to the stump dump tomorrow. Actually, I was quite restrained.  I have been known to go a little overboard with loppers and a trimming saw, but I haven't actually killed any of the hedges and bushes.  The vegetation around here is pretty forgiving. I am also working on my annual clear out the storage areas.  Mike put a lot of stuff up on e-bay and made some good money.  He knows about certain antiques and values so he can do that.  I just give stuff to the Salvation Army or the Clutter Barn.  The funny thing is we have yet to notice big expanses of cleared out space.  Strange about that. I recently read a magazine article about clearing people...

It is official, now.  We had the closing on the place in Florida and now have the papers in hand.  We own a winter home in Florida and we are very happy about that for so many reasons.  We will take a trip down again in the fall just to get a feel for living there and to figure out what we may need to make it truly home for us. It is in Venice, where we wanted to be--about four miles from the beach.  It is further away from the Sarasota County libraries.  I may have to get myself a bicycle to tootle around town.  My brother suggested a Florida car--you know, one where I could not see over the steering wheel.  Three thousand comedians out of work and he makes jokes. Maybe winters will get longer and longer, now.  Our Vermont house has been very good for us, but it is a raised ranch.  That means those pesky stairs.  (My black and blues are fading now, BTW.)  It also means windows that are a story and a half high.  My l...

My back wasn't quite as ready as the rest of me to be out digging in the garden the other day. Oof. I went off to get a pedicure at the mall this morning--along with every other retired woman in the county.  The wait was too long for me so I went shopping for some new bath towels and two new bed pillows.  Now I will just have to figure out a way to switch out Mike's nasty old stained pillow for the new one.  He is not so big on changes.  When I need to mess with him, I amuse myself by moving the couch and chairs away form the wall.  It never takes him more than a minute to start pushing everything back.  I guess he thinks I move things to sweep and then forget to put them back. So I don't have shiny toe nails, but my refrigerator is sparkling clean.  That makes me happy.  It's a true gift to get pleasure from the little things. I spent the afternoon at the library.  I volunteered to clean and organize the upstairs activity room a...

I do not get paid to research nor to endorse any product, but when I happen upon something that really works for me I do want to share.  So  for what it is worth, this is something I really do use and feel it works like they say it will. The other day, Mike had a blood vessel burst while taking a shower.  It took him a while to notice.  The result was a bloody towel, blood spots on the bath rug, and drips down the hallway and into the dining room.  Specific details are not relevant so let's just not go there.  Anyway, this is a picture of carpet that covers the hallway and dining room: The carpet is not white, it is "sand."  I picked it so that tracked in sand would not be glaringly obvious on a day to day basis.  Blood, on the other hand, and as you might well imagine, will be very obvious on this particular surface (blueberry pie filling, coffee, spaghetti sauce, red wine, fruit juice--yeah, it's all been there, too, and way more than actual...

We will be leaving Florida early (really early) on Thursday morning.  We did a lot of packing up yesterday and Mike will start to load the car with the non-essentials today. It's always tricky thing to get the fridge and kitchen cabinets cleaned out.  We are down to a half bag of frozen corn and one egg plus one can of artichokes and one can of evaporated milk.  Doesn't that conjure up a lovely dish for lunch?? I'm hoping that the same cleaning lady who was called in when we got here comes back after we leave.  I have been worried that she thought we made the mess we found on arrival.  I just can't bear the thought that someone would think poorly of our housekeeping skills. We did have a monthly cleaning lady for a while when I was still working and taking care of my mother as she started her journey through Alzheimer's disease.  One day she was arriving just as I was leaving with my vacuum and a bucket of cleaning supplies to go clean (as a g...

This is a copy of most of the e-mail that Mike wrote and sent to family about our arrival in Venice last Saturday: Good Morning Everybody, We are finally here and settled in. Had a nice uneventful trip down with only a few miles of driving through some light snow in upper NY state. We only had about 8" of snow as a result of the big Christmas weekend storm so the roads were pretty much cleared before we left. The house we are in was a complete disaster when we arrived on Saturday. The previous tenants were a crew of construction workers who had been in the house for three months and promised the property manager that they would leave the house in spotless condition. The house was filthy to say the least. The beds were covered with piles of damp bedding, everything was covered with dust and grime, all the furniture was in disarray, used towels in the bath, four trash barrels overflowing with trash, it went on and on. Olga was almost in tears. We spent the first few hou...

THE very worstest thing about a warm day in the fall when you live in the country is the g*#!d*#! flies.  I could spend the whole day vacuuming them out of the windows.  And, of course, last week I washed windows--just in time for the g*#!d*#! flies to spot all over them. Ick! I went for my annual physical yesterday.  As usual, my blood pressure was high the first take in the doctor's office, but this time it didn't go down with subsequent readings--averaged out at about 160/90.  Yikes! Now I have to go back and have it monitored again.  I think it was because I was somewhat dehydrated.  It is my opinion--unsubstantiated by any science--that all the ailments known to women stem from dehydration.  I drank lots of water last night and this morning my BP was 118/56.  On Thursday, I'll get my fasting blood work done.  Last year my cholesterol had gone up quite a bit.  With the increased fruit and veg intake, reduced meat and ...